drow zelensky: Oh, I forgot a fifth one: oil and gas

Brits, what is the deal with the neither Labour nor Tory parties, are they all actually better than both or is it a more mixed bag?

reform are fascists lib dems can contextually be more socially liberal or even economically progressive than labour but sometimes they're not and infamously were tarred by their experience of being coalition partners to tories i can't unbiasedly answer the question re: the SNP because i am a member

SNP wise I'd say you're very varied? Mix of classic social Democrats + almost Christian democrats held together by independence?

this is broadly not inaccurate

Yeah, I didn't want to quite use 'Christian Democrat' but I was struggling to think of a better term to capture the breadth of it and the wee free/socially conservative influence

I think it's basically fine for the microfaction around the Ewings. They have always seen themselves as something adjacent to that

It's multigenerational - his mum used to also beef with party central office all the time because they were much more leftwing than she was

Also thought there was a broader, sort of Tory/Socially conservative group beyond that?

So it's complicated because factions in the SNP really aren't consciously organised (indeed they are banned) and as such a lot of very different people might work together on similar aims

So you will find people who are for instance consistently economically leftwing but socially conservative, like John Mason, who will take the same side as someone like the Ewings on cultural issues but not, say, oil and gas

And in turn you will find people who are economically more centrist and socially more liberal who might despise both Mason and the Ewings but quite like Kate Forbes for her entire Business School Graduate (which she is not) vibe

You have these kind of interlocking patterns of individual cooperation or lack thereof that have more to do with who interpersonally gets along with who than a real ideological coherence

I think the best way of dividing groups in the SNP is not on ideology as such but on their answers to specific dividing /questions/: 1) Independence strategy 2) Secularism/abortion/cis queer people's rights 3) Trans rights specifically 4) "How high should taxes be"

There also used to be foreign policy but that's basically a closed debate now in that everyone's kind of come to the same broad consensus, ironically (Euro-Atlanticist with an emphasis on Euro, pro-Ukraine, pro-2SS in ME)

Oh, I forgot a fifth one: oil and gas

Someone might be, for instance, a patient reformist on how to get independence, redistributionist, largely against further oil and gas extraction, largely secular, and yet so rabid about trans people that she pals around with people who are the exact opposite on all the other Qs. Pic unrelated.

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